A distinguished social economist of my acquaintance, Carl Horowitz, produced a penetrating essay, which is available in the latest issue of Social Contract, on "The Alliance of Corporate Capitalism with Political Radicalism." Carl demonstrates that black nationalists, revolutionary socialists, and off-the-wall feminists have loyal benefactors among the corporate boards of high-tech enterprises and in older corporations like Pepsi-Cola and Citibank. Carl's illustrations are vivid and shocking, and his well constructed speech leads me to raise two questions occasioned by his evidence.
One: Carl describes his targets as people who are betraying the free enterprise system that has allowed them to flourish, but it might be asked whether this is really the case. Can't it be argued that someone like Mark Zuckerberg, the socially radical billionaire founder of Facebook, is being economically rational even when he indulges his infantile leftist fantasies and sports a Che Guevara shirt? Many of those who avail themselves of Zuckerberg's invention hold the same political and cultural beliefs. I'm not even sure that the decisions made by Facebook and Google here and in Western Europe to kick political conservatives off their sites is a bad business practice. Perhaps most users of these internet conveniences welcome P.C. intolerance. They may be like those college students who are demanding safe spaces and who cheer anti-fascist demonstrators keeping "intolerant" views from being expressed on their campuses. Political pressures are coming almost entirely from the cultural left, and it might make perfectly good business sense to accommodate these politically engaged customers.
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